The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (43 page)

Sheriff Hector Samuels
Bonfire Sheriff’s Station
Bonfire, The Farms
By Facsimile

Dear Sheriff Samuels,

We are pleased to inform you that the town of
Bonfire,
in the Farms, has been selected as a
bonus town
on the Princess Sisters’ current Tour of the Kingdom.

As you probably know,
bonus town
selection is highly unusual in Royal Tours, and is therefore
truly
an honor for Bonfire.

Your town has been selected as a consequence of reports of an extraordinary
recent event
in Bonfire. We understand that a young person
(Elliot Baranski)
successfully repelled an attack from a
first-level Yellow
using nothing but a
garden hose.
The Princess Sisters have expressed great interest in meeting with Mr. Baranski and discussing his revolutionary approach to
Color attacks.

We have further been informed that — either immediately before or after the altercation with the Yellow (reports are not clear on the chronology) — certain other young people successfully negotiated the rescue of an abducted child. It appears you have a glut of heroes in your town.

It should be emphasized that the selection of Bonfire as a
bonus town
is unrelated to your recent correspondence in which you suggested, amongst other things, that the Princess Sisters “skip” part of the Tour of Jagged Edge, since they would have “had it up to HERE” with the “mockery” in that province. On the
contrary: The Princess Sisters were delighted by Jagged Edge, were treated with the utmost
respect
and
humility
by its people, and are very sorry to be leaving it so soon.

The Princess Sisters intend to spend
twenty-four
hours in Bonfire. As is customary, they will commence their visit by parading through the streets in the Emerald Carriage. During this parade, they will
wave
and
smile
at residents of Bonfire but
will not address the crowd in any way,
and any person who
approaches the carriage
or
attempts to engage one of the Princesses in conversation
or
behaves in a foolish, comical, “wisecracking,” or otherwise odd manner
in an effort to get the Princesses’ attention will be shot.

After the initial parade,
one
of the Princess Sisters (Princess Ko) will attend the following events, while the
other
(Princess Jupiter) rests:

•
an awards ceremony
at which the Princess will greet,
chat briefly with,
and present a bravery medal to each of the young heroes referred to above;

•
three (3)
visits to town monuments, museums, scenic outlooks, items of curiosity, etc., of your choice, at which the Princess will exclaim and/or nod (please note, however, that the Princess is not particularly interested in farming, per se, and accordingly would prefer not to exclaim or nod about crops, irrigation, etc.);

•
two (2)
visits to recently opened hospital wings, orphanages, etc., of your choice, at which the Princess will be glad to cut a ribbon, smash a bottle, etc.;

•
a reception
to be attended by the mayor, high-school principal, sheriff, hospital administrator, post-office clerk, and
Elliot
Baranski
(so as to give the Princess an opportunity to chat with him for three to five minutes), and at which the Princess has requested that baked goods and GC teakwater be served; and finally:

•
a brief meeting
with your town seamstress (which meeting shall be the only event attended by both sisters), as the Princesses have requested that certain adjustments be made to their ball gowns, following their exposure to the fashions of Jagged Edge.

Enclosed, you will find:

• a suggested
menu
for each of the meals to be served during the relevant twenty-four hours;

• a list of accommodation requirements. We understand that your town hospitality options include the
Watermelon Inn
and the
Bonfire Hotel.
As the enclosed form notes, the Princess Sisters require
adjoining suites
in the most
luxurious
of these establishments, such suites to be the “presidential suite” or the “penthouse suite” or the “deluxe suite with harbor view” (should you have harbor views in your town), etc., etc. — that is to say, a suite with a grand title.

The Cello Secret Service will arrive shortly to carry out security checks; accordingly, please arrange for accommodation, food, entertainment, etc., for
twenty-five
members of the Service,
ten
members of the Royal Tour Committee, and
ten
members of the Royal Support Staff.

Finally, anything you can do to ensure good weather for the visit would be most appreciated.

We trust that all of these arrangements will be in place in time for the Princess Sisters’ arrival in Bonfire, scheduled to take place
tomorrow morning at 10
A.M
.

Yours with Royal Splendor and Harmony,

The Cello Royal Tour Bonus Town Selectors

P.S. The Princess Sisters have particularly asked whether your Pyramid of Pumpkins might be rebuilt in time for their visit?

Dear Madeleine,

It’s moonlight quiet on the porch out here, but the words are rattling around in my head like chains in the back of a pickup truck.

They all want to get written down first, the words, so if this ends up as nothing but a tangle, you’ll know who to blame.

(The words.)

First, though, I have to thank you.

You saved my life, and Corrie-Lynn’s too. Your Color talk — about water splitting sunlight into rainbows, about complementary Colors, about the fact that yellow and purple are complementary — well, to put it bluntly, it saved us. We made rainbows with sprinklers and sunlight, and somehow the purple in the rainbow killed off the Yellows that were coming for us.

So, like I said, thank you.

The trouble is, now I’ve got the whole Kingdom wanting to know more. Color Coders, Color Benders, the Cellian Center of Illumination, Department of Color Counterfuge, Brellidge University, Tyler University, Central Intelligence, guy who works in the local grocery store — they’re
all
calling up and coming around with questions.

And what can I tell them?

That a girl in the World gave me the idea?

They’d take the medal away and lock me up instead.

Anyhow, my point is, everyone wants to know and I can’t tell them.

Even Princess Ko.

Which brings me to the Royal Tour.

The Princess Sisters are sleeping at the Watermelon Inn as we speak — they came here on their tour today, and it’s been the craziest day this town has ever seen.

The Sheriff was so happy he was bouncing around like he’d turned into one of Corrie-Lynn’s puppets. His head couldn’t stay still on his shoulders.

Royal flags were flying, the school band was playing (which made me miss Kala and her saxophone), and the streets were lined with people, a lot of whom had even camped out last night so they’d get front-row views. (“People,” my mother said. “They’ll never stop mystifying me.”)

The Emerald Carriage came trundling through and you got a glimpse or two of princess smiles and princess hands in the air.

The Sheriff had talked Shelby into flying her crop duster over the parade, showering the carriage with silver petals from the blue jacarandas of Golden Coast — which looked pretty, but next thing security guards were shooting at the plane. Someone hadn’t got the message through, I guess, and they thought Shelby was throwing down poison dust.

It turned out okay. Shelby was doing some fancy flying, so they couldn’t get in a good shot, and Gabe tackled one of the guards to the ground. It all got cleared up, although Gabe ended up handcuffed to a door handle for two hours until somebody remembered him.

That’s been the only glitch so far, if you don’t count all the joking around of Gabe, Nikki, Cody, and Shelby at the awards ceremony. They’re on a high, see, because they’d been feeling guilty about driving the Twicklehams out of town, and then suddenly it turned a corner and seemed the Twicklehams
deserved
to be driven out. Although, the Sheriff keeps saying, “Hmm” about this, and, “The thing is, kids, you couldn’t have
known
they deserved it,” and, “If they
were
good people,
then …” Gabe and the others just put on frowns like they’re trying hard to follow his logic but can’t keep up.

As for little Derrin Twickleham herself — well, her name is actually Libby Adams — her parents are in town now, both of them whistling and hugging practically everyone they see. They’re very keen on Gabe and the others, for rescuing their daughter, and for giving the Twicklehams a hard time while they were here. They keep telling the Sheriff that, “No doubt, these young people
intuited
the wickedness of our daughter’s kidnappers.”

Derrin’s the one who wrote the
I am being held against my will
letter, by the way — the one that got through to the World.

Anyhow, where was I? I was talking about the Princess Sisters’ visit.

Yes, I was. And how my friends were sort of disrespectful ’cause of being happy.

Not that Princess Ko seemed to notice. Her focus was more on getting herself another baked pastry or a third glass of GC teakwater.

Oh, yeah, and the mulberry trees — I guess they were another glitch in the royal visit. They’re everywhere now, thanks to the Butterfly Child. Can’t take a step without a mulberry landing in your hair, or falling down your collar. Princess Ko got a mulberry stain on her dress, which was a national emergency for a bit, but, like I said, her mind seemed mainly taken up with cake so we all got over that and moved on.

There was a reception, late this afternoon.

I was invited, so was the Sheriff, and the Mayor, and a few other local people. Princess Ko walked into the room, and she’s all sparkle. Exactly like her columns, only slightly more high-pitched, if that’s possible. How she can talk — and live,
and breathe — at that level, is beyond me. You’d think it’d get her exhausted. Or at the very least make her ears ache.

Anyhow, she whirled around the room, excited about everything from the Postmaster’s shirt collar to the Mayor’s signet ring. When she got to me, she turned out to be really pretty, in that glitter-sparkle way that she has — and she started talking about the Color attack and how I used the sprinklers, and next thing, she’s begging me to
demonstrate
for her,
right this moment
, how I did it, since she thought it would surely look like a
whirlshine
of
prettiness
, a
landscape
of
rainbows
! (Those were her words.)

I was confused for a moment, looking around the Mayor’s living room (which is where the reception was held), wondering how I was supposed to get sprinklers in here — not to mention sunshine — and the damage it’d all do to the carpet.

That’s when the Sheriff stepped in and saved me, telling the Princess how he’d read every word of her columns, and asking after her folks like they were old family friends. Princess Ko kept wanting to get back to the
heroics
of the
Color Battler
(she meant me), which I was not so much enjoying, so I pointed out that my buddies were the real heroics.

I meant to say “heroes,” but she knew what I meant.

She said, “Oh, my, yes — and imagine! You had that Olivia Hattoway living and breathing amongst you all this time! Not to mention Mischka Tegan!”

The whole room went quiet in an instant.

There’d been murmuring, and teaspoons and so on before that, but the moment she said that name, it stopped.

“Hold on,” said the Sheriff, and looked at her quizzically.

“Yes,” she said, with a concentrating look. “The Security Forces brief me, you see, at each town, and it seems that you’ve had
four
Hostiles undercover here — Mischka Tegan and Olivia Hattoway and, more recently, the false Twicklehams of course. Now …” She stopped a minute, thinking, and the room
stopped breathing altogether, it was waiting so hard. “Now, as I recall it, Mischka and Olivia were here trying to infiltrate a branch of the Loyalists, but that fell apart and Mischka left town. Olivia stayed, and then the Twicklehams came with the stolen child. And they worked with Olivia secretly under the guise of parent-teacher meetings. We think they were trying to figure out what the Loyalists — Abel and Jon Baranski, I mean — had been working on.”

The silence seemed set to blow the glass out of the windows.

Princess Ko looked around, then took a deep breath and kept talking.

“Yes, you see, Abel and Jon Baranski were working on some secret project to try to assist us Royals against a Hostile plot. Mischka persuaded them she was on their side.”

There was a rising murmur in the room. Some people made distressed noises.

Then the Sheriff spoke, and set aside his manners.

“What in the
blazes
,” he said, “are you talking about?”

The Princess looked puzzled.

“Oh, didn’t you know? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. These things are meant for
top-ranked,
highly rated, quizzically over-the-top agents, aren’t they? And here I am, chattering. Security will kill me! If only Jupiter were here today instead of me, she’s
much
more discreet! Or a little anyway. Waiter! Take this teakwater away from me!”

She giggled.

In a more restrained voice, the Sheriff said, “Jon Baranski was killed by a Purple. And it’s our belief that Abel Baranski left town with Mischka for … romantic reasons.”

“No, no,” the Princess said. “Well, we can’t be
sure,
but I can tell you what Central thinks happened. Right. Jon and Abel were working on something secret when Mischka joined
them. Then, one terrible night — the report didn’t use the word
terrible
, that’s my innovation — one terrible night, Abel and Jon
discovered
that Mischka was a ‘bad guy.’ Before they could expose her, she
abducted
Abel, no doubt using a weapon of some kind. Weapons are all the rage. Jon was probably chasing after them in his truck, or perhaps heading to Abel’s family’s home to let them know what had happened? Anyhow, that’s when the Color attack took place. And so, tragically, he was lost.”

You can imagine the state of my head, and my heart, while she was talking.

“If this is all true,” I said, finally speaking, “where’s my father now?”

Then she looked at me, and you could see her linking it up.
“Baranski!”
she said. “You’re his son! Oh, well, you
would
want to know that. It’s dreadful, actually, that all this time you
couldn’t
know the truth. But there it is. That’s how Central Intelligence seems to work. Secrecy. Look, the thing is, we’re not sure. We do know the particular Hostile organization that has him. We know that.”

“How do you know,” the Sheriff said, faltering a little, “how do you know that he’s alive?”

“If they’d killed him, they’d have let us know.” She shrugged. “It’s how they work. Gloating. Intimidation. They’re probably keeping him prisoner, trying to get him to help them with their plans. Or to reveal the technology or whatever it is. Who knows? Maybe he’s even joined them!”

I was trying to shake this all into place, kind of believing her since she was a princess and all, but then I realized that it made no sense.

“No disrespect, Princess Ko,” I said, “but you must be mistaken somehow. My dad was not part of some Loyal club or whatever. He was in electronics repair.”

Princess Ko seemed to have forgotten her decision to stop drinking; she was looking around for somebody to refill her glass.

“He most certainly was,” she said, distracted. “Look around his things — there’s a secret code that Loyalists use to let others know who they are. It’s a number — they display it in plain sight, disguised as something ordinary.”

I was still shaking my head, almost laughing even, and then it came to me.

Peripheral connectors are: Pin 1: +12, Pin 72 and 13: Gnd.

It had been in my dad’s workshop, on his corkboard.

Guest Room Heaters: Pin 1: +12, Pin 72 and 13: Gnd.

That had been on Uncle Jon’s notice board at the inn.

Just at that moment, the Princess leaned over and murmured in my ear: “1, +12, 72, 13.” Then she stepped away and put a finger to her lips.

“Now, what about those rainbows?” she said.

I ignored her.

So did the Sheriff.

“My dad is really out there, being held by Hostiles?” I said, and the Sheriff was saying something similar.

The Princess smiled again. “It was in the report. Central Intelligence are looking for him, of course — they
will
find him eventually, don’t worry yourselves. Now, about …”

But I was gone.

I was flying from that room.

Heading home with a wildness I never knew I had — to tell my mother.

He hadn’t been taken by a Purple. He hadn’t run away with the Physics teacher.

It was a
third option
all along.

You think I was going to spend another second without her knowing?

My mother and I talked for hours, both of us crying. We were crazed, happy, frightened, furious. That all this time we hadn’t known. The wasted time. The wasted trips to Purple caverns.

But the more we talked, the more we let our anger get out of the way, well, the more it kind of made sense, the idea of Dad and Jon being in some secret Loyalist association. It fits with Dad and what he’d been like in the months before he’d gone; it fits with that spark in him, and how much he and Jon had liked adventure.

Anyhow, all this is to say, the train goes to the Magical North in the morning and my rucksack’s packed.

I’m going to the Lake of Spells, and I’ll catch a Locator Spell, use it to track down the Hostiles that have my dad, and then I’m getting him back.

Meanwhile, my mother’s going to get Central Intelligence talking — no top-level secrecy’s going to stop her. She’s down at the Sheriff’s station right now, to find out all she can about the Hostiles; then she’s going to
elbow
her way into the Central files, she says.

And she’s got some tough elbows on her, my mother.

So this time it really is good-bye to you, I guess.

I’ll miss your letters.

You take care — and thanks again for the Color information.

You know what I just realized? That Color information of yours, it’s true it saved me and Corrie-Lynn, but it’s also what brought the Princess Sisters into town.

That’s the reason they came here, see?

So without that, without that idiot of a Princess coming to Bonfire and giving away state secrets, I still wouldn’t know.

Thanks again.

Anyhow, I hope you got the healing beads in time, and they cured your mother, and you believe in us now and —

Lotta love to you, kid,
Elliot